Reflections, commentaries, critiques and ideas from 40 years experience in the fields of Community Development, Community Education and Social Justice. Useful tools and techniques that I have learnt also added occassionally.

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The name of this blog, Rainbow Juice, is intentional.The rainbow signifies unity from diversity. It is holistic. The arch suggests the idea of looking at the over-arching concepts: the big picture. To create a rainbow requires air, fire (the sun) and water (raindrops) and us to see it from the earth.Juice suggests an extract; hence rainbow juice is extracting the elements from the rainbow, translating them and making them accessible to us. Juice also refreshes us and here it symbolises our nutritional quest for understanding, compassion and enlightenment.

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Let's Try Something Different

How long have we been giving away our decision-making power? How long have
we thought that others have more ability to make decisions? How long have we
negated out own expertise?

In the western world we have been doing all this for centuries. Over one
thousand years ago feudalism in Europe began to impose its rule over common
folk. Feudalism morphed into the system of royalty – the supposed “divine
right” of kings and queens to rule. Under these systems, the power of common
folk to make their own decisions was wrested from them, often brutally.

Around 2,500 years ago, in the bottom right hand corner of Europe, a
different form of public decision-making was being tried out. Athens and other
Greek city states created the world’s first democracies – literally rule of
the people. The Roman Empire saw democracy being tested and eventually
done away with.

The Middle Ages saw some small pockets of democratic experimentation. In
1215 the Magna Carta Libertatum (Latin for Great Charter of the
Liberties) paved the way for the establishment of the English parliament.
Democracy was given another go.

Following the American Revolution the United States Constitution of
1787 provided for an elected government. Two years later, Revolutionary France
adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, and set up
the short-lived National Convention.

Modern democracy has evolved from these various experiments into the
representative democracy that many of us know today. Representative democracy
owes many of its features to Athenian democracy, although, arguably, more to the
Roman Republic.

The representative democracy of today has morphed yet again into a beast that
steals our decision-making power yet again. Certainly, we get to vote in
elections. But, can we truly say that a tick or cross next to a name on a
ballot paper once every three or four years is a satisfactory level of
engagement in our collective decision-making? No wonder many around the world
are withdrawing from the voting process. Even in Australia, the 2016 federal
election saw fewer people cast a vote than in 1925, when it became compulsory to
vote. In the US which portrays itself as the guardian of democracy, voter
turnout for the Presidential election is less than 60%. Although the past
couple of years have seen the trend bucked slightly, voter turnout in Canada,
the UK, and New Zealand has been declining since the 1980s.

A measure of dissatisfaction can be found also in the Brexit vote in the UK,
or the claims by Catalans for independence from Spain.

Even once we have cast our vote, do we really believe that it is our voices
which get listened to in the parliaments, senates and congresses of the world?
The voices that get heard and acted on are those of the trans-national
corporations and their lobbyists. In her 2015 book1, Beasts and
Gods, Roslyn Fuller showed that the more money someone spent on a political
campaign the greater their chance of being elected. In other words – money buys
political power.

Yet, we persist in thinking that our vote will change things. We persist in
thinking that if we elect a new set of politicians then we will get better
decisions. It is a little like Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Lets try direct democracy. If we need to find a representative group to make
public decisions, then lets try selecting them by lot (see here, here, and here
for some posts about this process). Lets hold onto our personal and collective
decision-making power. Lets explore together ways to utilise and optimise our
decision making power. We certainly could not do worse than the decisions that
currently come out of the parliaments, senates and congresses of the world.

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About Me

I have almost 40 years experience working (paid and unpaid, government and non-government) in community development/education and social justice fields. I have continued to keep myself abreast of philosophies and theories in these and related fields. This blogsite will offer ideas, thoughts, reflections on these fields as well as giving some tools and techniques. I don't pretend that these will be original but I do hope that they will be able to translate some of these diverse ideas into coherent forms accessible to workers in the areas.